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Goblin Quest: UPDATED!

Earlier this year I wrote Goblin Quest, a game about small, fatally inept creatures struggling to achieve even the simplest of tasks. After feedback from playtesters, I’ve now released an updated version which, I believe, is slightly better than the first one. This new version comes with:

1. Marginally improved layout! (It still sucks, if anyone feels like laying it out better than I have I’d be endlessly thankful)

2. Rules for playing on after all five of your Goblins are killed in entirely preventable accidents, including Being a Dog!

3. Rules for Lucky Ears, giving your Goblins a tiny sliver of agency!

4. Improved GMless play, in that I rewrote it with GMless play in mind rather than just adding it on as an afterthought!

5. Exhaustive and fully updated list of playtesters!

It’s still in playtest, of course, and will be until I can get the numbers down and some semi-professional art in the margins. If you’re interested in playing Goblin Quest, I’d love to hear from you. By all accounts it’s pretty good fun. One playtest group ate an entire horse! Wouldn’t you want to do that? Of course you would. Give it a go.

Download the Goblin Quest playtest pack here

Download just the rules PDF here, if you’re on a smartphone or something

After a year and a half of playtesting, I’m Kickstarting Goblin Quest!

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Comments

6 responses to “Goblin Quest: UPDATED!”

  1. Alex Winfield Avatar
    Alex Winfield

    I have found a huge community of gamers in San Francisco and will play this with AT LEAST SOME of them. I look forward to telling you how it went!

    Reply
    1. grant Avatar
      grant

      Aces. By the way, have you got that expanded edition of Drunken Bear Fighter laying around anywhere?

      Reply
  2. Nick Avatar
    Nick

    So a buddy of mine and I put Goblin Quest through its paces last night. Our quest was Light A Mountain On Fire; ambitious but doable, we thought.

    It was hilarious. We started off trying to collect wood to burn on the mountain; my friend took his first goblin into a shack full of bugbears and started breaking tables. Trying to be a distraction, my first goblin thought to grab a nearby cat and throw it into a trash can. As my Expertise was “Be A Distraction”, it was perfect! Until I rolled two Injuries off the go. The cat I grabbed slashed me bad and then, when I opened the trash can, another cat leapt out at me and mauled me to death.

    Other highlights include: Convincing an orc to carry the wood for us up the mountain by threatening him with bad breath; waking up a bear on the mountain and promptly being mauled to death; said bear fighting off a horde of orcs coming to investigate where their friend had gone; and using the Broken Slingshot of Destiny as a diving rod to find water in order to be safe from the fire.

    It was good times all around. Hilarious, entertaining, streamlined, fun; what more could you ask for?

    One complaint: it was pretty hard to play without character sheets. We only had access to the .PDF (no printer at home) so we were forced to sketch out the goblin forms and recreate the character sheets from scratch. Obviously that’s something that could be avoided with better planning, and we did it pretty spur-of-the-moment, but I guess it might be something worth considering?

    Reply
    1. grant Avatar
      grant

      I can see how that might be a problem! Any ideas on how to fix it? I really like the tactile, visual element of playing and drawing on maps and passing them around between each other. Maybe put in a section advising what to do if you don’t have a printer that cuts out the drawing stage?

      (Thanks for the feedback, by the way! You should send me an email with your names in so I can credit you properly. I’m thinking of making a section detailing the great Goblin Quests of the playtesters, so I may well put it in a later version.)

      Reply
      1. Nick Avatar
        Nick

        I really like the visual element as well; drawing little goblins and then giving them features was entertaining and definitely played into the hilarity of the experience. It was just difficult to do without the pre-drawn forms to use, especially because I’m an abysmal artist. Haha! A section where you give an alternative to the drawing would definitely be helpful, I think. Even just a quick checklist of things you need for each goblin or something. You can always emphasize sketching them out on your own or whatever, but an alternative is always good!

        (Will do! I’ll shoot you an email right away!)

        Reply
  3. Conan Avatar
    Conan

    I play tested this with Grant a few days ago. We had the quest to kill a knight while riding a warbadger. Some of the steps included shaving the badger, upsetting the badger and armouring the badger (in that order)

    My Goblins were exceptionally hairy, who excelled at being sticky and had a stick with a head on it that was really good at making other people think I knew how to do voodoo.

    It was fun, definitely.

    It could use tweaking, though of course most things can be tweaked over and over til the orcs come home.

    A++ would play again

    Reply

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